Jesse Jackson A look into Black History James Stevenson 2/22/16 1st Hour

Origin Jesse Jackson was born as Jesse Louis Burns on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina. His parents, Helen Burns, a high school student at the time of her son's birth, and Noah Robinson, a 33-year-old married man who was her neighbor, never married. A year after Jesse's birth, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, a post office maintenance worker, who later adopted Jesse. In the small, black-and-white divided town of Greenville, a young Jackson learned early what segregation looked like.

Historical Facts After graduation, he began divinity studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary and worked to organize student support for Martin Luther King Jr. Jackson was placed in charge of Operation Breadbasket, an SCLC initiative to monitor companies’ treatment of African-Americans and to organize boycotts calling for fair hiring practices. Jackson’s new venture, People United to Save Humanity (PUSH), was similar to Operation Breadbasket, but its scope expanded with its leader’s passions. In 1984 Jackson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, winning five primaries and caucuses and more than 18 percent of votes cast. Jackson’s multiracial National Rainbow Coalition grew out of his work in the 1984 campaign and merged with PUSH in 1996. Jackson ran for president again in 1988 and won 11 primaries and caucuses and nearly 20 percent of the vote.

Influences Jesse Jackson was influenced by the environment in which he was raised in He and his mother had to sit in the back of the bus, while his black elementary school lacked the amenities the town's white elementary school had He was also highly influenced by Dr. Martin Luther king Jr., who aided him in his rise to power in the SCLC Their views, however, would soon contradict each other, and they were not on good terms at the time of King’s assassination

Timeline http://www.timetoast.com/timelines/jesse-jackson

Legacy The actions that Jesse Jackson has taken part in has caused him to have a huge impact on the fight for civil rights today His career has made it evident that there are some cases in which the problem is not between races, but in between classes. In a interview with PBS frontline: “So there's great disparity between who goes to college and who goes to jail. Who lives long and who dies prematurely, is the defining issue of our time. And I submit to you, there's a significant race dimension, it is basically class-driven.” Politics will never be the same because of his strong efforts to put African American first in the election

Legal Lynching Combining a powerful moral argument with recent, overwhelming evidence of systematic legal error and widespread racial bias in death penalty cases, Legal Lynching directly attacks the basic claims of those—including our new president—who continue to insist on execution as a punitive solution for an increasing number of crimes. With the abolition of the death penalty in South Africa, the United States has become the last industrialized democracy to persist in state-sponsored execution.

The man himself

Reflection To me, Jesse Jackson is like a hero. Both his events in the past as well as his recent visit to Cass Tech has inspired me to strive to be the greatest at what I do. By simply demanding that students recite the same phrase over and over again shows how much he cares about the nature of our future. He wants everyone to focus on their own success, and not so much bringing down that of others. Without him, certain ideas to even have a African American would probably not be present, let alone making the idea reality. Overall, I consider him to be one of the most influential people of all time.

Sources http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/intervi ews/jackson.html http://www.biography.com/people/jesse-jackson- 9351181#later-years http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/jesse-jackson http://www.timetoast.com/timelines/jesse-jackson http://www.afro.com/the-legacy-of-jesse-jackson/ http://thenewpress.com/books/legal-lynching